The capability of wireless mobile stations (e.g., cellular telephones, personal digital assistants, handheld computers) is rapidly increasing. Wireless mobile stations now have the ability to access the Internet using a microbrowser that is part of the mobile station. The microbrowser is a very simple version of personal computer browsers such as MICROSOFT'S INTERNET EXPLORER and NETSCAPE'S NETSCAPE COMMUNICATOR.
There are presently a number of competing approaches for browsing the Internet from a mobile station. For example, Wireless Access Protocol (WAP), IMode, and Web Clipping are a few such approaches.
A WAP forum is attempting to standardize the rules for communicating in a wireless manner with the Internet and the World Wide Web. A language designed for this type of communication is the wireless markup language (WML). This language is a new way of encoding World Wide Web content. An extensible markup language (XML) application, WML was designed for wireless communication devices with small, low-resolution screens that are prevalent on cellular telephones.
The problem with WAP-enabled devices or Web Clipping devices to is that an intermediate server is required to translate the HTML content to a form that is suitable and optimized for a particular wireless device. In the case of WAP, for example, the content is formatted to fit the least capable mobile station on the market.
All of these approaches restrict the wireless user to view and interact with a limited subset of Web sites that the service provider chooses to make available to the end user. The end user, for example, may be limited to viewing only YAHOO, EBAY, and SPRINT homepages since those are the only sites that the service provider has translated to the appropriate format for that service provider's mobile stations.
Additionally, choosing the least capable mobile station as the standard, as is done in WAP, does not allow colorful, multimedia Web sites to be displayed well on devices that have the capability to display such sites. Other technologies require that a separate Web site be maintained specifically for that format. This puts the content providers in the position of having to maintain two separate Web sites with near identical content. The user is still limited to visiting only those sites that have the separate content. Therefore, there is a resulting need in the art for a way to provide Internet content to all Web-capable mobile stations without limiting the mobile stations to any particular Web site.